On stealing electrons
03/11/2006
<rant mode="on">If you own a coffeeshop and you advertise your “FREE WIRELESS” access (with a neon sign, even!), then you need to offer your customers plugs.
Lots of plugs.
On the (continuing) cute surprises of Mozilla lore…
03/08/2006
I just checked in the patch for Bug 329686 (which should hopefully make AUS more useful to open source projects, including… y’know, ourselves!) and received this handy dandy reminder of my responsibilities as a developer with Mozilla CVS checkin access:
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 21:47:22 -0800
From: bonsai-daemon@mozilla.org
To: preed@mozilla.com
Subject: [Bonsai] You're on the hook now!
You are responsible to make sure the build of the Seamonkey Tree works.
You just checked into mozilla/config the files: autoconf.mk.in. From now until the tree is verified and opened again, you are to be available for the build team to pester in case of any problems.
I find this amusing for a number of reasons. But most of all, I think, because I’m pretty sure that I know where I’ll be for the rest of evening… in case I need to pester myself due to any problems…
Tinderbox, Tinderbox! Wherefore art thou Tinderbox?
02/24/2006
After working on problems with tinderboxen for the past week—some on really important branches, like the 1.0.8 security release, others on more… eclectic stuff (read: Cairo)—I’ve come to the conclusion that we have too many Tinderboxen!1
That was reinforced by the fact that we started running out of space for logfiles on branches that matter, when there were gigabytes of logfiles hanging around that I’ve never even heard of.
In looking at the main Tinderbox page, I wonder: does anyone care about the following Tinderboxen?
- Aviary-1.0
- BlueBird
- Mozilla1.0
- Mozilla1.4
- Mozilla1.5
- Mozilla1.6
- Mozilla1.7
- Phoenix
If so, speak up before the end of next week… otherwise, these tinderboxen (both backend machines and frontend space for logs, etc.) will be on the chopping block.
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1 Technically, that should read “Too many Tinderboxen for us to manage right now.”
Surf’s up!
02/15/2006
12:26 <@preed> it hasn't moved to the head of the list (by any stretch), but... this will get it on my radar.
12:26 <@preed> (whereas before, not so much.
12:27 <dmose> preed: i'm happy to do the hands-on work myself if that's appropriate
...
12:27 <@preed> it's funny... Justin and I were talking yesterday, and he blithely said "Yeah, you're drowning right now."
...
12:27 <@preed> and I was like "Aww... I thought I was treading water!"
12:27 * dmose chuckles
12:27 * dmose buys preed a surfboard
On that note, I need to set a topic in #build (cf. Coop’s comments, which express my opinion on the matter perfectly).
#build: for all your build/release engineering-related needs
02/13/2006
Coop and I were discussing this morning how it’s easy for build-related requests to get lost in #firefox and #developers.
There is a #build on irc.mozilla.org, but it was previously used for build team chatter.
It’s been opened now though, so if you:
- Have a build/release engineering request that’s not getting seen in other channels…
- Are interested in working on (or seeing others work on) build/release engineering-related things, like makefiles, autoconf, AUS2, etc.
… or…
… then feel free to /join #build!
If you need build-related support (“Firefox won’t build on my VIC 20!”), please continue to ask in #developers and #firefox; right now, the build “team” is pretty time-constrained, so we’d like to keep #build high on the signal-to-noise ratio, and use it as a filter for ensuring high priority items are addressed in a timely fashion.
Thinking outside the box
02/09/2006
I had to ship “something” (a gadget) back to a company today.
This item came to the office in a box, of course. But, it actually shipped in an outer… “shipping” box. This box was lost in a horrible horrible misplaced-box-janitor-cleanup-destruction accident.
Thusly, to ship my item back, I needed to another “shipping” (outer) box.
I asked Karen—our trusty office assistant/shipping queen—”How could I solve this problem?” She directed me to the stash of FedEx boxes downstairs. Downstairs I trek to find said a “shipping” (outer) box!
(Oooh, the suspenseful adventure!)
At first, I had some trouble finding them, but then I found an inconspicuous (as opposed to standard colorful white, orange, and blue) box that FedEx that had shipped to us containing—you guessed it—boxes!
So, to recap in case I’ve lost any of you: I took the box out of the box that FedEx shipped to us to put a box that had been shipped to me in another box in a box so FedEx could ship it back to the company.
This post brought to you by the Cardboard Recylcing Board of America and post-AUS2-update-creation-head-banging-insanity.
Everyone’s Telling “Chase Stories”
02/07/2006
While putting out the latest fire(s) today, I find myself asking Chase more questions in a single day than I ever have before.
I guess it’s all the prospect of him not being just a desk away really sinking in, causing me to panic and just ask him about something, as opposed to take the (extra) time to figure it out for myself.
I joked with him earlier this afternoon that I’d be stuck to his leg, crying like a four year old deathly afraid of being left at daycare as he tried to leave the building tonight. It’s not a unique sentiment.
His laughter was a mixture of amusement and fear that I wasn’t joking, I think.
At Chase’s Farewell Lunch, a few people were telling Chase stories and I decided to tell mine:
Like McDonald’s, only significantly more satisfying
01/25/2006
I’ve been using Thunderbird 1.5 (technically, “Mail/News,” since I’m a filthy Gentoo user) for a couple of weeks now, and I gotta say: spell check as you type?
I’m lovin’ it.
Reward of One’s Convictions
01/24/2006
Friday’s San Jose Mercury News had an article speculating over Disney’s and Pixar getting together and the rumors have continued to fly (and become less… rumor-ular) over the weekend, culminating in today’s announcement that Disney’s board met to “mull,” as the Financial Times called it, “the transaction.”
Those of you who may know me, know that I’m not a big fan of Apple-the-company, or their two major platforms, the Macintosh and the iPod.
The company sports legendary legal and marketing departments, the former of which is responsible for arguging some of the worst precedent-setting cases in software law (when it’s not suing Mac rumor websites and little old ladies) and the latter of which is on par with Microsoft in terms of the amount of spin and obfuscation they’ll inject into a product announcement or discussion of an issue. The quality of their products isn’t particularly impressive (to me, anyway, especially given their “markup” relative to comparable industry products), and they tend to optimize for “style” and “hipness” as opposed to quality. (At least they best Microsoft in this regard, who always chooses profit and market-control over quality in their optimization equation.)
The worst display is the nexus of these not-particularly-flattering traits that is MacWorld, which from an onlooker that hasn’t imbibed the Koolaid, seems to me to just be a “reality-free zone” for three days. Steve Jobs’ showmanship during this event remains unchallenged throughout the industry, but the constant clapping at every statement and the uncritical thinking regarding every announcement reminds me every year of that famous iProduct parody, which just nailed it: “Steve Jobs could take a dump, put it in an off-white plastic case, add two grey buttons and a small LCD display, and you’d pay $600 for it.”
But there’s one thing I’ll give Steve Jobs…
My First Time
01/17/2006
Hot on the heels of Thunderbird 1.5, and mere weeks after Firefox 1.5, Firefox 1.5.0.1rc1 was (mostly quietly) released last Friday for the world to play with over the long weekend.
(AUS2-based updates should be out this week.)
One of my first tasks was to set up the MOZILLA_1_8_0_BRANCH Tinderboxen for Linux and Win32, so while this is a release with no less than four digits in its version number (and some letters too!), it’s been an important one for me personally, just to see the machinery of how a release process works at MoCo. It’s been particularly valuable to see it from pretty much the beginning.
My initial impressions of it all?
It involves a lot of rsync(1)… not that there’s anything wrong with that.1
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1 As Jerry Seinfeld used to say…